In a captivating revival at Theatre Royal Bath, a double-bill of Terence Rattigan’s one-act plays brings 1950s Britain to vivid life, delving into the era’s pervasive loneliness, exclusion, and carefully concealed desires. Directed with immaculate pacing by James Dacre, Summer 1954 pairs the lesser-known Table Number Seven with Rattigan’s celebrated work The Browning Version, delivering a moving slice of midcentury English social history that still resonates today.
Quiet Tragedies Unfold in Rattigan’s World
Set against the backdrop of the homosexual witch-hunts that gripped 1950s Britain, Table Number Seven emerges as the more emotionally potent of the two plays. It revolves around the plight of Major Pollock, portrayed with quiet devastation by Nathaniel Parker. Posing as an upper-class army man at a posh Bournemouth hotel, Pollock’s true identity is exposed when he is caught “importuning” – Rattigan’s original euphemism for propositioning men, which he later changed to the harassment of women.
The play gathers steam as it stages arguments for and against acceptance through the reactions of various hotel denizens. Lolita Chakrabarti brings dignified steel to the role of the hotel manager, while Siân Phillips is magnificent as the scandalized dowager who outs Pollock to the other guests. Alexandra Dowling, playing her sheltered daughter who has found an unlikely friend in Pollock, embodies the very picture of vulnerable spinsterhood.
Rattigan, himself a closeted gay man, vividly captures the profound loneliness and isolation experienced by homosexuals in an era when their very existence was deemed a “public menace.”
Repressed Desires Simmer in The Browning Version
In the more famous but less impactful The Browning Version, Rattigan, renowned for capturing the repressed desires and quiet disappointments of postwar Englishness, paints a pained portrait of marital malaise. Parker takes on the role of a retiring classics schoolmaster trapped in a dysfunctional marriage to his younger, frustrated wife, played by Chakrabarti. Their toxic dynamic hints at the play’s origins as another coded depiction of closeted homosexuality, eliciting pathos for both parties even as some of the more scathing dialogue fails to fully land.
While the production remains in the realm of the melancholic rather than the overtly tragic, it nonetheless conveys a pervasive sense of sadness and marital futility. The characters circle each other in an expressionistic revolving set designed by Mike Britton, the many doors and windows emphasizing their painful visibility and lack of refuge.
Rattigan Revival Sparks New Appreciation
In the years following the premiere of these plays, John Osborne’s groundbreaking Look Back in Anger was widely perceived as sounding the death knell for Rattigan’s genteel drawing-room dramas. Osborne’s brand of gritty social realism made Rattigan’s work seem quaint and outdated in comparison, a view endorsed by the playwright himself.
Yet this revival, coinciding with a current production of Look Back in Anger at London’s Almeida Theatre, invites audiences to reappraise Rattigan’s enduring relevance. His one-acts, with their simmering tensions and poignant de profundis, offer an incisive exploration of the human condition that transcends their immediate postwar setting.
Encountering these works anew is not merely an academic exercise in dramatic archaeology, but a means of bearing witness to the hidden emotional lives and thwarted desires that shaped an entire society.
Under Dacre’s sensitive direction and animated by pitch-perfect performances from a superb ensemble cast, Summer 1954 excavates Rattigan’s astute social observations with empathy and understanding. It’s a production that firmly re-establishes the playwright as an unparalleled chronicler of the quiet tragedies and unspoken longings that lurked beneath the placid surface of midcentury Britain.
As the characters in Table Number Seven and The Browning Version struggle against the suffocating constraints of their time, Rattigan’s incisive character studies resonate with contemporary audiences grappling with issues of alienation, repression, and exclusion. This moving double-bill is a timely reminder that beneath the veneer of conformity and respectability, the human heart remains a complex and often tortured terrain.
